compris ce soir-la
que Jenkin ne detestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les mains
en l'embrassant. Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu'on puisse l'etre;
et notre affection s'etait par lui etendue et comprise dans un _tu_
francais.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] Robert Lawson Tait (1845-1899).--ED.

[27] William Young Sellar (1825-1890).--ED.

[28] Not reprinted in this edition.--ED.

CHAPTER VII

1875-1885.

Mrs. Jenkin's illness--Captain Jenkin--The golden wedding--Death of
Uncle John--Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin--Illness and death of the
Captain--Death of Mrs. Jenkin--Effect on Fleeming--Telpherage--The
end.

And now I must resume my narrative for that melancholy business that
concludes all human histories. In January of the year 1875, while
Fleeming's sky was still unclouded, he was reading Smiles. "I read my
engineers' lives steadily," he writes, "but find biographies depressing.
I suspect one reason to be that misfortunes and trials can be
graphically described, but happiness and the causes of happiness either
cannot be or are not. A grand new branch of literature opens to my view:
a drama in which people begin in a poor way and end, after getting
gradually happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not
the thing at all. It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act
to close on a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily
growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where
things get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not
grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a
little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new idea
was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned notion of art.
Hold a mirror up, indeed! Let's paint a picture of how things ought to
be, and hold that up to nature, and perhaps the poor old woman may
repent and mend her ways." The "grand idea" might be possible in art;
not even the ingenuity of nature could so round in the actual life of
any man. And yet it might almost seem to fancy that she had read the
letter and taken the hint; for to Fleeming the cruelties of fate were
strangely blended with tenderness, and when death came, it came harshly
to others, to him not unkindly.

In the autumn of that same year 1875, Fleeming's father and mother were
walking in the garden of their house at Merchiston, when the latter fell
to the ground. I